OMG it’s 8:30 pm on Thursday night and I’m just starting to write the post. That’s what this week has been like! I swear that when the weekend gets here, I might not even get dressed! For sure I should have bought this stamp when we saw it a couple of weeks ago:

If it weren’t for panic and caffeine, I wouldn’t get anything finished. Kathy’s birthday is Friday and I had an ambitious idea for a birthday present. I’ve been working on it for two weeks and got it done, today! Honestly, I should think these things through; I could have given it to her for Christmas and skipped the last minute panic attack at 2 am last night! We buy stuff for each other all year round and I probably have six or seven things tucked away that would have made awesome presents. But nooooooo!

We did not pose these two lovebirds:

Just the staff or another shopper having fun, and we joined in. We got a belly laugh thinking about what it would be like to kiss a chicken. Actually, the rooster is pretty cute and might be fun in the yard especially if you had a coop full of hens. They aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, so if you plopped the rooster near the coop, all the hens might start flirting with him.

We were digging through the bins and found a vacuum cleaner:

I was sort of meh about it laughing at the harvest gold color, but thinking it had pretty cool shape. Then I looked at the box:

What the heck is a nearly 50-year-old Italian vacuum cleaner doing in the bins at Goodwill? It probably was an awesome vacuum and the owners should have made varooom-varooom noises while using it so they could feel like Mario Andretti while cleaning. My motto is: Housework is better if you can have fun doing it.

This was the sweetest set of hankies, still in their box:

We have a question, though. What are cocktail-size hankies? Do they mean handkerchiefs that you can tuck in your little black bag when out having cocktails? Or do they mean you use them like napkins during a cocktail party? These look a lot like all the other handkerchiefs that are imported from Switzerland—pretty embroidered flowers, and lovely cotton with rolled edges. Nothing about that says “Cocktail”.

Oh, for the love of Mike! Why are people being mean to dogs?

His expression says it all, “Hit me with your best shot. I’ve heard them all!” That Brillo-Pad hair is really strange being that Snoopy doesn’t have a pompadour. It looks like the back is open to store something like a toilet brush. He was over a foot high, so he wouldn’t be sitting on the edge of your sink with a scrubby, although, then the Brillo Pad would make sense. I feel sorry for him, but not enough to give him a home. Hopefully, someone is more creative than we are, and can put him to use not storing a toilet brush.

Speaking of toilet brushes:

Even when this had paint, it was hideous! Now it’s sad and hideous. The size of the toothbrush that girl is using makes it look like a brush for something else bathroom related. I don’t care what kind of artist you are, there isn’t a thing even Raphael could do with this metal plaque to make it attractive. Now that I’m thinking about it, what happened to this that the paint is gone? It was just hanging on the wall in a bathroom; exactly what kind of cleansers were the owners using? If I had a crucible, this would be fun to melt and make something useful.

We looked at this for a while, and could never decide what it was:

Big round yellow disc, so it’s the sun, right? Well, not so fast. What’s with the green pipe cleaner arms and legs, and red shoes? Also, usually the sun has some sort of corona around it, all flamey like. We thought about yellow M&M’s, a yellow pill, a smiley face and decided, “Nope!” B.H. suggested a banana-flavored manhole cover, and that makes as much sense as anything else. Those empty soulless eyes are really creepy.

We weren’t really sure what this was, either:

Sure, it kind of looks like a wicker lighthouse, but why? I guess the black sombrero on top comes off, hence all the tape. We weren’t curious enough to take a look inside. It would probably just leave us with more questions, like where is the big light? Why does the whale by the door say, “Live free”? Thinking about this kind of stuff would make lesser women crazy; we’re just a little loopy.

Well, if you’re going to display a wicker lighthouse, you might as well have these, too:

All kinds of colorful resin fish made and colored by people who have never even seen a real fish before! Just display them around the lighthouse, and have fun watching people tiptoe around you with a lot of side-eye thrown in for good measure. You might even get a couple of questions about whether you’re feeling okay. It would be fun, and give these poor things a whole new life.

We were at two estate sales last week and I bought something cool at one of them:

It says, “Cairo prayer near the Great Sphinx” in the bottom left corner. It’s from sometime between 1906 to 1936 according to the internet, and also came as a postcard. You can tell it’s old because the Sphinx hasn’t been excavated, and there is nothing around the pyramids. It was in a nice old frame, too. It caught my eye because I was in Egypt on vacation, and was astounded by how built up it is around Giza:

This is me and friends posing trying to get into the local paper. It was a trip to remember, and I’m so glad we went before it became less safe to travel there.

Well, to tell the truth, I’m not quite done with Kathy’s present and card. Time to get back to work on that, and stop rambling here. Hope you all get some wonderful spring weather this weekend and are able to get out and enjoy it.

I can solve the mystery of the cocktail napkins (hankies). A cocktail napkin refers to the size. They are much smaller than a dinner napkins which is meant to cover your lap. A cocktail napkins is a small square…large enough to set your drink on with a little extra fabric to spare. So these little cocktail hankies are small enough to fit in your teeny tiny purse (along with tube of lipstick and a dime).

Happy Birthday, Kathy! And good work getting her present finished, Deb! That wicker lighthouse may be a souvenir from New Hampshire – their state motto is Live Free or Die – and part of the state is on the ocean… I admit to being fascinated by the round yellow thing with the green legs and red feet, but I have no idea what it’s use is. How big was it?